


the end and the way

by lupinely



Category: The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Multi, a consummation of sorts., gender neutral/bigender character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 06:33:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13875171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lupinely/pseuds/lupinely
Summary: At the end of his life, retired Stabile of the Ekumen Genly Ai shares a part of his story on Gethen that he never told.





	the end and the way

**Author's Note:**

> I reread _The Left Hand of Darkness_ last month for the third time—the first time since Le Guin's passing. Thank you for everything, Ursula. You changed my life.
> 
> (As a note: a great deal of this story is intended to "update" the conceptions of gender and sexuality that Le Guin employed in _Left Hand_ when it was published in 1969, but even so I have not done so perfectly. I use the word "homosexual" a few times when I would really rather not, but it seemed to fit the story best, and hopefully my fellow gays will forgive me for it.)

 

 

 

 

I knew as they happened that there would be things during our journey across the ice together that would never make it into my official report to the Ekumen. Just as Estraven promised to say nothing of our mindspeak conversations in their journals, so I promised myself, then and later when the journey was over, that there were things too private, too precious to include as part of an official record of early contact with Gethenian society.

Of course while training to become a Stabile of the Ekumen, I had learned that there would be many personal parts of my experiences on new worlds that I might not want to share and that I should choose, anyway, to do so in the name of contributing to the body of knowledge that the Ekumen possessed. Never before had this bothered me or given me pause; I am not a particularly reserved man, and my life on Gethen was so singularly focused on my mission that the idea that any of my experiences might end up being too vulnerable to share seemed rather laughable. But it came to me during our eighty-six day journey that there were indeed some things between Estraven and me that I wanted to keep to myself, either as an emblem of the bond that we came to share or as a talisman to ward off the narrow-minded thinking I had previously employed during my years on Gethen thus far.

Whether these secretive matters I kept for myself would have had any edifying purposes had I shared them, I cannot know. Perhaps, but perhaps not. We were but two individuals alone in the world, and the experience of two people, while illustrative, is not extrapolative. And of course my feelings of selfish reticence only intensified after Estraven’s passing; these memories were all I had left of our time together, and I needed in many ways to bear them in solitude, for I do not think sharing them would have lessened my grief but rather increased my burden of it.

So I write this now at the end of my life, not as an Ekumenical report to be kept in the vast archives on the planets of all the known worlds, but as a memoir of sorts: an _in memoriam_. Estraven’s name has never been fully cleared even in their death, not even when Gethen joined the hearth of the Ekumen and not now that it has been a part of it for several decades. I suppose in Karhide there will always live on the legacy of Estraven the Traitor, and nothing that I, the eternal alien, write now can ever change that. But it seems to me a great disservice to the one whom I loved for me to leave this life, of which I have publicly documented so much, without talking at least briefly, without humiliation or shame, of that one who was the greatest love of my life. I think Estraven would laugh at me, for there is little maintenance of _shifgrethor_ in the retelling of these memories, but there is a deliberate eschewing of the rigid gendered behavior that dominated my life before I learned on Gethen to finally challenge it, and I hope in doing that much at least that I may prove myself worthy.

I do not know when exactly that great love began in me, for I was reluctant to admit it to myself for what it was, afraid of its implications regarding my self-image that I had created and upheld all my life. While homosexual and transgender identities had been accepted on most of Terra for hundreds of years, I must admit that within me I had always maintained that old sense of disdain for such people, due no doubt to my fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be homosexual or transgender, and to my upbringing as a cisgender man who placed great importance on the assertion of masculinity in his everyday life. I did not date very much at all, my life’s focus being on my work with the Ekumen, and so my identity as heterosexual, which I had always assumed to be fact, did not factor greatly into my life’s daily processes. It was something I merely accepted as a absolute about myself, like the information provided during a mathematical theorem that has been proven time and time again and is therefore simply given. My mission to Gethen was therefore a sort of personal test. I knew the planet to be populated by ambisexual human beings, the only humans in the known galaxy like that at the time (though of course now, several decades later, other worlds have been discovered to possess people of this sort, and scholarship has begun to shift from the previous assumption that bi-sexual humanity is the galactic norm).

Doubtless my old attitude will seem preposterously outdated to contemporary readers. I make no excuses for it, and I can only hope that my work and advocacy later in life has been enough to, if not make up for, then at least amend and soften the impact of the errors of my younger days. My time on Gethen was spent during my mid- to late-twenties; Estraven was only twenty-nine, nearing thirty, when taken from this life. So you see then how young we really were. It is now many decades later—nearly two centuries, thanks to my habit of planet-hopping aboard NAFAL ships—and yet those eighty-six days on the Gobrin Ice remain the most transcendent period of my entire life.

I have couched this in circuitous explanation long enough. I will say what there is that I have left to say, and I can only hope that, when I too am gone, the story of the journey Estraven and I made will mean something to someone among you; perhaps even something wonderful.

 

 

 

A moment between Estraven and me that I never documented occurred one day early in our journey, when Estraven asked me if I could not see them as a person without stumbling first over the fact of their gender.

I had been more than two years on Gethen by that point, and I had fallen easily into the practice of identifying all Gethenians not currently in kemmer with the pronoun “he.” I chose it because the masculine identity is the unmarked one in Terran society; the woman is something  _other_  than a man, whereas a man is just a man. It seemed to me the easiest way to think of these people who were not precisely men but who certainly were not always women. The Gethenians, of course, have a variety of gender neutral pronouns in all of their languages, pronouns that can be translated to Terran languages with some difficulty, though admittedly not overly much. Yet I had been reluctant to do this. I had instantly discarded the idea of referring to any human being with the pronoun “it” due to the way it seemed to dehumanize and objectify them. Yet it never occurred to me simply to use the neutral pronoun “they.”

“It seems to me,” Estraven said, in their quiet, measured voice, “that you create an inordinate amount of difficulty for yourself in insisting on referring to any Gethenian not in kemmer by the male pronoun. In doing so you cast them as being like men from your society, men always in kemmer, men always striving to be masculine. It annoys you then when Gethenians do something unmanly, something you consider womanly. You see it as a disgusting subversion of your own gender. But in truth it is merely the assertion of our own reality. We are always both men and women, and we are always neither. Of course I can make no comment on how you view people from your own society, but it seems to me that you are also too quick to assign gendered expectations to Terran men and women, and this causes you anxiety as well.” Estraven paused then, seeming to realize just how this long speech had gone on for and that it no doubt posed some sort of threat, not to my _shifgrethor_ , but to my aforementioned masculinity. “I have overstepped, I think. I am sorry. I merely wished to alleviate your agitation.”

But of course they were right. (At the time I still used “he” to refer to Estraven, but in this retelling I will amend for that error and use the pronoun that I have used for the past long years of my life whenever I have thought of them, which has been often.) I did not say much that night, taking Estraven’s apology as a chance to end the conversation and avoid confronting my own consternation and discomfort. Yet in the days that passed I could not help but think on the subject and attempt, tentatively, to think of Estraven in my mind, not as a he, but as a they. I found the change much easier than I had expected. Of course I slipped up often and made mistakes, but before arriving on Gethen I had thought that thinking of a human being not as a he or a she but as a they to be impossible. I soon found that this was not true. And in those days I found as well that my anxiety regarding Estraven’s behavior did lessen.

Of course this anxiety I felt was due to my own preconceived prejudices and not to anything that Estraven did on their part. I have felt, all this time, that I learned so much from them, and I cannot fathom that they learned anything even comparable from me. I told them of the Ekumen and starships and the ansible and NAFAL travel, but all of that was abstract and ultimately irrelevant to their life. The things that Estraven taught and showed me have fundamentally changed who I am and how I think. I like to think that if they had lived, I might have had the chance to do the same for them. Whether that is arrogance or a genuine desire to have positively impacted the life of the person I cared for, even now I am not sure.

So a few days after that conversation between us, I tentatively brought up the topic with Estraven once more. We had been working on mindspeak at this point, though so far no connection between our minds had yet been made. I said, “I have been using a neutral pronoun lately when I think of you.”

“Oh?” They were at the stove cleaning up from our dinner. Mild interest, not invasive. “Do you think of me quite often?”

I would not realize until later—much later, months later—that they were teasing me. I took the question very seriously, because I was feeling very serious. “Often enough,” I said. “There is little else to think about during these long treks, unless I want to think about the hardships we still have left to face.”

When they turned from the stove, their expression was grave, any trace of that former teasing gone. “I suppose that is true.” A moment’s pause. “And how has the change in your thoughts affected you?”

It was a question born out of concern. I ground down on the impulse to think of that concern as motherly or nagging, and instead recognized it for what it was: the concern of one friend for another. “You asked me whether I thought I could think of you as a person first without bringing the question of gender into my mind. For my whole life gender has been utterly tied to the concept of personhood. A person was either a man or a woman, and therefore their manness or womanness was somehow bound up in the fact of their personness. I thought to think otherwise would somehow be a denial of some fundamental fact of what it means to be a person.” I paused, looking at the stove, the light of which Estraven had turned down but not put out entirely. “I see now,” I said slowly, “that in some ways forcing a person to exist only when you can qualify their gender does a disservice to the very idea of being a person, which should be the most fundamental and essential character you recognize in another human being. Other questions of gender, race, nationality, and status should all be secondary to the primacy of that singular fact. I do not mean that I have completely changed my way of thinking. No doubt it will be a long process, and I will make many mistakes. But I see now that I have been thinking of the matter all wrong, and—” I hesitated “—in doing so I have treated you unfairly. I am sorry for it.”

Estraven, still grave, nodded seriously. It was one thing to think of them with neutral pronouns, another to look them in the face and challenge myself to see their appearance as one not necessarily that of a man or of a woman. I did my best; as the days went on I would become better at it. And as I tried to do this, I realized that my previous discomfort regarding the sexual tension between the two of us that arose when Estraven would enter kemmer—and, truthfully, a tension that remained for me even when they were not in kemmer—eased greatly, and became, not something that I was utterly comfortable with, but that I could experience without feeling only great shame or uncertainty. Indeed it became a solace to me, a consolation: a reminder of our shared humanness in the middle of a vast, uncaring world of nothing but ice and glacier.

“I am glad,” Estraven said. “I think this change of mind will help you greatly when you return to Karhide.”

“That is not why I did it.”

Estraven, with their large dark eyes, met my gaze firmly, without hesitation. “I know that, my friend.”

There was silence between us after that, and each of us got ready for sleep. Estraven, overly hot in the warmth of the tent, slept atop their bedcovers, while I slept buried beneath mine. After a while I said into the darkness, “May I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“You asked whether I could see you as a person before I saw you as someone gendered. You were right to ask me that. I do not ask this now in some sort of retaliation, but because....” I was curious? That was not quite right, and I should not say it. “Because I want to know how you think of me, since I have spoken so much of how I think of you. Do you see me as a person first, rather than as a man in perpetual kemmer? Is that a distinction that you make in your mind, or is it one that does not serve you?”

A long silence. Estraven was methodical and careful and never said anything but what they meant precisely. That it took them so long to answer spoke perhaps to the complication of the question, but also to the complication of providing an honest answer.

“I do not know,” they said at last. “I admit that your sexual differences can preoccupy my mind because I am unused to them even now. I would hope that they do not eclipse your fundamental personhood in my thinking, but not having considered it carefully and monitored my thoughts, I cannot be sure. I hope that does not offend you.”

“Of course not.”

“Since you have made the change to your own thoughts,” Estraven said, “I will seek to make this change to mine as well. Is that all right?”

“Yes,” I said, and not long after that both of us fell asleep.

 

 

 

I do not know exactly when during our journey that this next memory happened, but I believe it must have been after these conversations about our thoughts and personhood, because a great deal of my anxiety regarding interactions with Estraven were gone. It was the day my left eye froze shut and I worried that I had lost the use of it forever. We stopped and Estraven built a shelter of ice around us to block out the wind. I did not know what we would do; if we wanted heat we needed to set up the tent, and to do that so early in the day—for it was only just after first hour—would set us back on our schedule, and we were already sorely behind. I sat in the shelter, not particularly cold anymore but my eye still quite shut and numb. Estraven approached me, removing their scarf and face mask, then their gloves.

“Even you will get frostbite in this cold if you remove your gloves for long,” I said. “You cannot hope to warm me with your hands alone.”

“No,” Estraven agreed. They removed part of my own face mask, only enough to reveal the frozen eye. Then they hesitated and put their gloves back on.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I will need to use my mouth,” Estraven said. They sounded almost apologetic. At first I could not even understand what they meant. Then it came to me.

“I....” I started to speak in protest, but the words died on my lips. We could hear each other over the roar of the wind, thanks to the shelter Estraven had built, but only barely. They had to lean in to catch the sound of my voice.

“I must act quickly, Genry, lest you lose the use of your left eye entirely.”

For a moment, I wondered wildly whether that would be so bad. Then I realized how hysterical my thinking had become. I swallowed and nodded my assent, knowing that Estraven was right and that if I wanted to see from both my eyes once more, they would need to do what they had said.

Estraven leaned towards me, framed my face with their gloved hands, and put their mouth against the frozen skin of my eye. First they used their breath to warm me, a process that had to be continual and constant to avoid any condensation refreezing on my face. When it proved insufficient, they hesitated slightly, then opened their mouth and gently pressed their tongue against my closed eyelid, so as to directly apply warmth to the frozen nerves and skin.

I sat there motionless with my other eye closed, not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe. It seemed preposterous that this should happen and that this should be the solution to my afflicted eye. Yet of course it was, and Estraven, diligent as always, soon had my eye restored from numbness. A stinging pain began then on the left side of my head, but I bore it silently. After nearly an hour we agreed that we needed to set up the tent for the day after all, and we did so. Once inside Estraven resumed their ministrations, and full feeling and mobility, though not yet sight, returned to my eye.

I felt very flushed and self-conscious when they stepped away from me. I wanted to ascribe it to the heat from the stove, but that was not the reason why. The reason was Estraven, of course. It was always Estraven.

They seemed to sense my discomfort, for they gave me a small smile and set about making us dinner since we had missed lunch due to these complications. They bade me lie down and hold a warm poultice over my eye, which I did while also trying very hard not to think at all.

 

 

 

Despite my promises to myself and to my memory of Estraven that this story deserves, in some measure, to be told in its entirety, in recounting these pieces of it I find myself faced with that old reluctance, the old desire to hold something so special and sacred close to my heart and my heart alone. I will say here then less than I intended to. There is one last memory that I think I must share, or try to share. And I will do my best.

The last time Estraven entered kemmer during our journey over the ice, they did not, as they had previously, develop female sexual characteristics. Instead they began to develop male sexual organs, which did not seem to concern them though it bemused me greatly. I was the only person Estraven was in contact with, and I was eternally male. All former knowledge of Gethenian biology indicated that Estraven must, in response to my maleness, develop female sexual organs during the period of their kemmer.

I finally drummed up the courage within myself to ask them about it. Their explanation was gentle and slightly amused. “It is the general tendency of two Gethenian individuals in kemmer, when reacting to each other, to develop the sexual organs required for heterosexual intercourse. However this is not always so, and the development of similar sexual organs is not so rare as you might think. For kemmer does not occur only for purposes of biological reproduction but also,” and only now did their voice stammer slightly, “simply for sexual pleasure, which, as I am sure you know, does not require that the individuals involved have differing sexual organs.”

I was utterly stumped but attempted not to show it. This threw everything that I thought I had known about Gethenian kemmer into a new light. And of course I realized immediately how foolish I had been to assume that only heterosexual intercourse occurred on this planet, which was full, as I had learned on this journey, not of ambisexuals but of human beings who were persons first and gendered beings second.

“Does this disturb you, Genry?” Estraven asked it gently, apparently concerned that I might feel the same sort of anxiety again that had plagued me during the early days of our relationship.

I said—truthfully—“No, it doesn’t. I simply did not know it. My own assumptions, I expect, got in the way of me again.”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you....” I struggled over it. “Do you usually develop differing sexual organs from your partner’s, or similar ones?”

It was an absurdly invasive question, of course. I only realized that after asking it. Estraven, however, seemed utterly unperturbed by my curiosity. They said, “I have found it to be utterly random throughout my life. Some people only develop differing organs; others develop only similar ones. I suppose in some ways that mirrors your Terran notions of heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality. I do not know where I would fit in that paradigm.”

Truth be told, I no longer knew where I myself fit in that paradigm. Out here in the middle of nowhere, the two of us alone, both exiles in the most profound sense of the word, it hardly mattered any longer.

“We should get some rest,” Estraven finally said at last. We fell into our pre-sleep routines, but all the while I could barely think of anything other than them. The constancy of their presence beside me had finally reached, I think, a breaking point of sorts. Not in a crude sense, or a desperate one, or a purely sexual one. But we had become closer than I had ever been to anyone in my life, then or since. And finally I realized at last that I did long for them, quite deeply and irrefutably, in a manner that was also sexual.

Oh—speaking of this in the clinical terms I learned as a Stabile of the Ekumen takes all the joy out of the realization that I had in that moment! For there was joy, and wonder, and relief too. It was a moment of pure catharsis and transcendent delight, and it remains the outstanding realization and moment of my life. I longed for Estraven, body and soul, and I finally allowed myself to know it.

“Therem,” I said abruptly—for at this point we had been speaking mind to mind for several weeks, and I called them now by their hearth name—“I want to ask you one more thing.”

But of course I did not know how to ask it. I could find no words. And so instead, on my knees before them in the dim light of the stove, with Estraven looking back at me with their large dark eyes as they sat up atop their bedspread, I took their face in my hands with as much tenderness as I could spring up from the depths of my soul. I did so in a way that would allow them to refuse my touch, because we had agreed weeks ago not to come in physical contact with each other while Estraven was in kemmer, for it would make any desire felt on their part, especially if unconsummated, even harder to bear. Yet Estraven did not pull away from me, and in that moment we decided our fate together. I kissed Estraven on the forehead with my wind-chapped lips, hoping that this gesture-question was something that they would understand.

It was. They looked back at me when I pulled away, surprised but not taken aback, trusting in me completely. Their own hands came to my face.

I cannot bring myself to say any more about what happened between us after that. Surely it is obvious enough. The love that we made then together has been with me all the rest of my life. And now that I face the end and the way of my own life, I expect that I will carry that love with me into whatever awaits beyond. I can only hope, foolish as it may be, that when I reach that place, Therem will be there to greet me.

 

 

 

_Light is the left hand of darkness,_  
_and darkness the right hand of light._  
_Two are one, life and death, lying_  
_together like lovers in kemmer,_  
_like hands joined together,_  
_like the end and the way._

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
